Category Archives: meta

Meta information, personal posts, blog related news and etc.. This is where I apologize when the blog goes down, or warn you if I plan to be MIA for a while.

Post a Comment, Win a Free Book

Recently Adam Kahtava had a free book giveaway on his blog. I was the lucky winner! The prize was a copy of Javascript: the Good Parts by Douglas Cockford (you can read Adam’s review here). I don’t think I have … Continue reading

20 Comments

I have my own domain squatters

The other day I got the following email. Curiously, Gmail did not flag it as spam which it probably should. Before you read it though, I strongly advise against actually going to the terminally-incoherent.cn website. It is seriously NSFW. And … Continue reading

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Don’t Close Comment Threads on Old Blog Posts

A blog without comments section is not a blog – it is a vanity page. To me blogging implies a conversation between the reader and the writer. Often comments may be better than the blog entries themselves. Especially when blogger … Continue reading

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Yes, I know it’s Slow

I apologize for not switching hosts once again. Dreamhost was actually improving lately. Several people told me that there was a very noticeable performance improvement evidenced by much faster load times of this blog. But, alas they are back to … Continue reading

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The Post with No Content

Time for some shameless self promotion. I know that bunch of people read this blog via feed readers and rarely clicky the things on the sidebars. I also know that I rarely update the sidebar links to the other services … Continue reading

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Downtime on Thursday Afternoon

Apparently some of you had the doubtful pleasure of seeing my directory index between 4 and 5:30 pm yesterday. Apparently I set their server on fire by (check this out) flushing the WP-Cache to see the small tweaks in the … Continue reading

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Taking Weekends Off

Just wanted to drop a quick note here – I won’t be doing Saturday posts anymore. I already gave up on Sunday posting back in January and I mentioned I might go down to a much healthier 5 day schedule. … Continue reading

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Comment Notifications Are not Working

Comment notifications are not working. Or rather they are working but with like a 48 hour delay. So if there was a comment posted today, you may get it Wednesday or something like that. And there is nothing I can … Continue reading

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Sunday Posting Suspended

I’ve been running this blog on a 7 day schedule for quite a while now. I pretty much got it down to science, cranking out posts out on time. Recently though I noticed that this self imposed schedule started becoming … Continue reading

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What happened to the review scores?

You might have noticed that I stopped using the hreview format, and the 5 star scoring system for my reviews. I don’t know if you miss that part, but I decided to drop them. Why? Well, part of the reason … Continue reading

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Pro Tip: Don’t Mess Up Your MX Record

If you were trying to send me an email yesterday you might have received a nice returned mail transcript. That’s because I fucked up the MX record when “outsourcing” my mail to Google Apps. Since Dreamhost is having major issues … Continue reading

2 Comments

Comment subscriptions may be b0rked for some

Quick note for those of you who use Gmail and rely on the comment subscription thingymajig to follow the discussions around here. There seems to be some weird bottleneck when relaying emails to gmail accounts, which seems to be affecting … Continue reading

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Site Issues

If you noticed general slowness and or occasional outages in the last few hours I apologize. I was busy eating a late lunch at work, which included a salad that contained lethal dose of garlic. Seriously, I could totally slay … Continue reading

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Invite Me To Your Favorite Torrent Site Day

I need help locating the new heads of the unstoppable hydra that is Bittorrent. Since Demomoid, my primary source of all that is good was shut down again I need new places that have good stuff in high quality and … Continue reading

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Ambiguous One Liner Comments

Lately I started getting lots of odd one liner comments that usually look somewhat like this: Great post! I really enjoyed it! There are many variations, but the message is always the same – a generic praise that does not … Continue reading

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/dev/random now with comments

I added comments and trackbacks to the /dev/random via Heloscan. I love the idea of Tumblr, and it’s bookmarklet makes is it really easy for me to rapidly post all kins of random shit that I find on the internet. … Continue reading

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Blogs Without Comments

How do you feel about blogs without comments? It seems that lately it is fashionable to say that “comments don’t scale“. I guess Joel Spolsky is probably the most quoted individual who argued against having open comments on your blog. … Continue reading

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Site Outage and Commenting Problem

Two quick announcements regarding the site performance. Yesterday I was messing around with the .htaccess and mod_rewrite for a post that will probably hit the blog on Monday. I inadvertently broke WordPress permalinks in the process and so no one … Continue reading

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Is anyone else having issues with Tumblr?

Tumblr is giving me a headache today. Whenever I try to upload an image I get this lovely message: I get it with both the bookmarklet and a manual upload form. Posting text entries, chat quotes and etc still works … Continue reading

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Find Your Shared Server Neighbors

As you may or may not know, I’m on shared hosting. This means that the box located somewhere in the deep caverns of Dreamhost data center is not only home to this site, but also bunch of other sites. I … Continue reading

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Top Commentators and Top Posts

If you hit up the front page you will see two new little things in the sidebar. One is a list of the 10 most popular posts on this blog. All of my posts that got dugg at one point … Continue reading

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How do you deal with comment spam?

I always viewed blog spam as a complex problem which requires a multi-layer solution. There is simply no silver bullet that stops all the spam and gives you no false positives. Most conventional approaches can be grouped together into 6 … Continue reading

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Running without CAPTCHA Experiment

I decided to disable the CAPTCHA in the comments section – at least for a few days. I haven’t seen much spam here lately, and I feel that Akismet and Bad Behavior have been doing an excellent job scooping up … Continue reading

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Gasp! My brother is getting a Zune…

My brother’s girlfriend decided that she will buy her man a shit-brick for his birthday. I tried to intervene and explain to her than she should buy him an iPod instead. They are in the same price bracket, and the … Continue reading

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Why I’m never on IM

If any of you added me to your buddy list, or have me as a contact in Gmail, you probably noticed that I sign in only once in a blue moon. There is a reason for this. I like to … Continue reading

11 Comments